Creating Change in Corrections: Exploring Participatory Visual Research as a Gender Transformative Methodology

How menopause symptoms shape experiences of the criminal legal system: A qualitative study across the United States.

Improving Health Equity for Women Involved in the Criminal Legal System.

Existing literature has yet to conceptualize and consolidate research on psychological essentialism and its relation to the criminal legal system, particularly in terms of explaining how individuals with justice involvement have been and could be differentially impacted across contexts. This article explores essentialism in the criminal legal system, including its potential consequences for inequity. We review research on essentialism as a psychological construct, its common applications to different social categorizations, and its trickle-down effects within the criminal legal system. Empirical work suggests that biases stemming from essentialism have the potential to severely affect individuals within the criminal legal system. Beyond assigning immutable properties across social groups, essentialism can give rise to biased attributions of responsibility and blame and affect decisions and behavior within three core domains of the criminal legal system: jury decision making, sentencing decisions, and public support for punitive policies. We propose future policy recommendations to mitigate the adverse effects of essentialism in the criminal legal system, focusing especially on how using and adopting person-first language (focusing on people before characteristics) across society and policy can help to combat bias across criminal legal domains. Future research is needed on how to best address the adverse effects of essentialism and its biasing effects in the criminal legal system, as well as to examine the effects of essentialism in different legal contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Even before the pandemic, contact with the criminal legal system resulted in health harms on both individual and community levels, with disproportionate impact on people of color. The COVID-19 crisis magnified the deleterious public health impact of policing, prisons, community supervision, and other elements of the United States’ vast system of control and punishment. Despite the scientific consensus that prisons and jails needed to be rapidly depopulated to avert disaster, the number of people released has remained small, resulting in explosive outbreaks of COVID-19 behind bars. Depopulation of correctional settings is also rarely paired with meaningful efforts to connect reentering individuals to vital supports. Community supervision systems failed to relax onerous probation/parole requirements, while police have taken on enforcement of physical distancing and other public health orders. Even as COVID-19 is raging, the criminal legal system is resisting changes necessary to facilitate pandemic response. With a focus on incarceration, this Chapter provides an overview of how the U.S. criminal legal system has shaped its COVID-19 response, situating prescriptions in the current debate about divestment from structures of social control in favor of a renewed focus on the social contract. This Chapter will discuss (1) how the criminal legal system has exacerbated the current public health emergency and (2) how the United States can use this moment to reform this system and its legal underpinning.This paper was prepared as part of Assessing Legal Responses to COVID-19, a comprehensive report published by Public Health Law Watch in partnership with the de Beaumont Foundation and the American Public Health Association.

Patterns and contexts of polysubstance use among young and older adults who are involved in the criminal legal system and use opioids: A mixed methods study

A growing body of research has now identified the criminal legal system as a major social determinant of population health and health disparities in the United States. The current review provides a description of the U.S. criminal legal landscape, briefly summarizes recent research findings, and identifies new and needed directions for research. Building on prior research first identifying direct contact with the prison system as a social determinant of health, recent research provides evidence of elevated risks for physical and mental morbidity and mortality among those with direct or indirect contact with the criminal legal system. This research has been expanded to include community supervision and contact with police as important drivers of health.While this evidence base has grown, our understanding of the role of the criminal legal system in population health has remained limited for several reasons: (1) prison and jail incarceration remain the primary forms of contact examined despite the existence of other relevant forms of carceral contact and control; (2) the longitudinal health consequences of contact with the criminal legal system have largely gone undocumented; (3) the majority of the research is descriptive and does not employ causal modeling approaches; and (4) relatedly, the mechanisms that link criminal legal system contact with health are not adequately measured. The criminal legal system has emerged as a significant social determinant of health. While advances have been made in documenting the direct and indirect consequences of contact for population health and health disparities, more work is needed to better ascertain how and why this contact matters.

BackgroundA growing body of research has called attention to limitations to reproductive autonomy in both women who are socially disadvantaged and in those who have had contact with the criminal legal (CL) system. However, it is unclear whether CL system contact influences contraceptive use patterns and how these processes unfold. We utilize a mixed-methods approach to investigate whether history of arrest is associated with receipt of contraceptive counseling, use of long-term contraception, sterilization, and subsequent desire for reversal of sterilization. We further consider how agents in and around the CL system may influence women’s reproductive decisions and outcomes (856 survey respondents; 10 interviewees).ResultsWe observe that women who have been arrested more commonly report receipt of contraceptive counseling and sterilization. They are also significantly more likely to want their sterilization reversed. Our in-depth interviews suggest that women with CL contact experience considerable shame, and in some cases, coercion to limit fertility from various agents in and outside the criminal legal system including medical providers, Parole/Probation Officers (POs), guards, and family members.ConclusionsOur findings suggest the need for ongoing attention to how exposure to this system may promote uneven use of certain forms of contraception and dissatisfaction, i.e., desire for reversal of sterilization, among these women. Findings further suggest that de-emphasizing the CL system as a means through which to address reproductive needs should be considered.

Each year, millions of families with children in the United States (US) come into contact with the criminal legal system (CLS), the deleterious consequences of which are well documented. Families exposed to the CLS often face many stressors and may benefit from supports and services designed to enhance parent–child relationships and connect them to health-promoting resources and services. Early childhood family home visiting (FHV) is a two-generation strategy to support pregnant women and families with infants and young children, many of whom encounter the CLS. Yet, little is known about the CLS experiences of families receiving FHV. This scoping review summarizes the published research on CLS experiences among FHV-enrolled families in the US. Seven online databases were used to identify research published between 1967 and 2022. Following PRISMA guidelines, articles were required to focus on FHV and CLS involvement. Twenty-eight articles met inclusion criteria; five were systematic reviews or meta-analyses, 22 were primary sources with quantitative measures of CLS, and one was a qualitative study. Among the primary quantitative sources, more than half (55%) included CLS measures to describe the sample and the others included CLS variables as outcomes. CLS involvement was a common experience among families receiving FHV services. This scoping review provides an important first step in describing the existing research on FHV participants’ CLS involvement and can inform future efforts to serve this group of families.

The current configuration and function of U.S. societal structures drives the overrepresentation of people with serious mental illness in the criminal legal system. Although the causes are multifactorial, the mental health system poorly serves those at highest risk of criminal legal system involvement. The growth of the mental health evidence base regarding the social determinants of mental health has ushered in greater understanding of their central role in the promotion and maintenance of mental illness and health. These academic strides, however, have failed to translate into widespread care and payment policy changes. Additionally, as is the case in the criminal legal system, structural racism shapes people's experiences in the mental health care system, contributing to inequitable mental health outcomes for persons with severe mental illness from racial and ethnic minority groups. This is a critical consideration for the population involved in the criminal legal system: Black and Brown people make up more than half of those incarcerated in the United States (despite comprising just 32% of the total population). In the absence of an intersectional, antiracist, structurally informed approach, any attempt by the mental health care system to stem the overrepresentation of people with serious mental illness in the criminal legal system will fail. This article provides an overview of the current mental health care system's shortcomings in serving this population. It proposes concrete steps to address these shortcomings, with a special focus on race and social determinants of health.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a significant public health concern and has implications for people directly impacted by the criminal legal system during arrest, conviction, incarceration, and community supervision. This meta-analysis estimated the lifetime prevalence of TBI among people supervised by the criminal legal system across settings. Building on previous research, we hypothesized that prevalence estimates would be impacted by methodological, clinical, and demographic factors. Eligible studies included those with adult participants supervised by the criminal legal system (i.e., prison, jail, probation, parole, inpatient/forensic hospital) and that provided sample TBI prevalence and method of ascertaining TBI history. We employed subgroup analyses and metaregression to investigate the effects of setting, TBI definition and method of detection, lifetime history of mental illness and substance use disorders, and gender. The sample ultimately included 64 studies totaling 52,540 participants. Using a random-effects model and logit transformation, we found that the overall estimate of TBI prevalence was 45.8% (95% confidence interval, CI [37.8, 54.1], 95% prediction interval, PI [5.5, 92.5]) across all studies and 32.0% (95% CI [25.0, 39.8], 95% PI [11.2, 63.6]) for moderate-to-severe TBI. Significant effects were found for TBI definition and method of detection on the pooled estimate. The prevalence of TBI among people impacted by the criminal legal system may be larger than in the general population. However, despite recent and ongoing progress in this area of study, the reliability of prevalence estimates remains limited by methodological factors related to TBI definitions and detection methods. Implications for TBI research and clinical service provision are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

While the scale and scope of the criminal legal system is often discussed with attention to racial disproportionalities, the fact that disabled people are overrepresented at all points in the system is less discussed by social workers. Disabled people come into contact with the criminal legal system as suspects, defendants, incarcerated persons, victims, and witnesses. Compared to people without disabilities, disabled people are more likely to experience victimization, be arrested, be charged with a crime, and serve longer prison sentences once convicted. These trends are even more profound for disabled people with intersecting marginalized identities, such as people of color, women, poor people, and those who identify as LGBTQ. This article provides an overview of the connections between disability, law enforcement, and practices of imprisonment in the United States. We provide a historical overview of the involvement of disabled people in the criminal legal system, review the prevalence of disability in the criminal legal system, and then discuss the unique ways in which disabled people are impacted by the criminal legal system. We conclude by providing recommendations for social work practice and advocacy based in disability justice.

In this paper, I discuss what happens when sexual interactions involve wrongdoing but are not typically recognized as rape by the criminal legal system, even though they are legitimate instances of sexual wrongdoing that require redress. A lack of response by the criminal legal system can negatively affect those who are wronged sexually in this way. And even when the criminal system does recognize an instance of sexual wrongdoing, the response is insufficient. The wronged individual is frequently rendered a mere pawn int he prosecutor's pursuit of incarcerating the wrongdoer, which continues the objectification of the person wronged begun by the assault. In contrast, restorative justice can help a wronged individual reassert their subjectivity to the one who initially objectified them. So, I offer restorative justice as a viable alternative to our current criminal legal regime because it seeks to support those wronged by sexual violence as they heal in addition to rehabilitating those who perpetuate sexual wrongdoing, thereby protecting the public safety and helping to make real change.

An updated systematic review of the literature on fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and the criminal legal system.

Research has established that individuals affected by frontotemporal dementia (FTD) may have symptoms, including behavioral symptoms, which violate social norms and may be considered "criminal." As a result, persons living with FTD may be more vulnerable and at risk for interactions with the criminal legal system, including arrests and incarceration. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with care partners for people with FTD who have had contact with the criminal legal system in the United States. Interviews were transcribed and preliminary thematic coding was performed. Emergent themes include stress and anxiety about their loved one's interaction with the police, dwindling social support due to their loved one's symptoms, the role of education and advocacy as a protective factor, and the need for more training and awareness about dementia for the criminal legal system. Preliminary analysis reveals that care partners of individuals with FTD who have had contact with the criminal legal system have diverse experiences and perspectives. Despite this heterogeneity, they face common barriers, mostly due to a lack of awareness and education about the criminal legal system. Care partners rely on shared strengths such as education, social capital, and advocacy skills to navigate these challenges effectively.

The Bridge Between Racial Justice and Clinical Practice.